Hosting FAQ

Hosting FAQ & Help

General Support

Do you have cPanel so I can control email, website development, DNS, carts, SSL certs, FTP, etc., etc., etc.?

I'm having trouble connecting to the server via FTP.

That's not a question, but you're probably forgetting to enable encryption.
Except for a few sites which have yet to make the transition, you must enable FTPS.
See our FTP Support Page for more information.

How do I configure my email client for domain mail?

Development Help

Feedback Forms: FormMail

FormMail is a generic Perl script you can use to write a form which takes a user's input and returns it to you in a nice organized format.
You can even customize it by adding hidden configuration fields to the form.

Download the example form.html.txt file to work with (right-click the link and select "Save as...").
Save the file to a working directory on your computer.
Edit this file and customize it to taste, putting in your own <BODY>, header, and footer.
Don't change any of the <INPUT> tags inside the <FORM> block, unless you'd like to customize your script to handle different data.

Look through the file and change whatever is in [brackets].
Make sure that you find and change the following line:

Replace [your username] with your actual login name, replacing the brackets as well; so the line would become:

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="recipient" value="username@pacific.net">

When you've finished, upload the file to your webpages directory, and place a link to it somewhere in your main page.
Now, if all has gone well, you should have a working feedback form!

FormMail is configured using hidden form fields.
All the fields you can use are fully documented at Matt's Script Archive.
In particular, take a look at the "Optional Form Fields" section, which describles all sorts of options from what output file it should use
(if you'd like to thank the user for filling out the form, for example),
to the format of the e-mail output that gets mailed to you, to what fields you want to be mandatory for the user to fill out – it's all there.

Password Protected Directories

Site Statistics

Hosted domains have statistics packages installed that allow website owners to view information about who is visiting the site.
You can see what links visitors are clicking on, what links are most popular, how they got to your site, and more.
Terms that visitors entered into a remote search engine are shown, so you can see what "search terms" brought people to your site through the various search engines.
Statistics are gathered from webserver log files and are generated at least weekly.
If you have a cPanel account, you will find the various statistics packages under the "Stats" section.
For others, you will need to visit "http://yourdomain.tld/_webstats/".

MySQL Databases

All hosting customers have access to MySQL.
MySQL is a high-performance SQL database that makes having a large, fast, and dynamic website possible.
Databases are best used for storing rows and columns of similar or similarly used data.
MySQL can be used to store product data, customer data, order data, html, text, pdfs, word documents, or anything else.
Many "off the shelf" products available for website use, such as bulletin boards, forums, photo albums, blog software, and others use MySQL to store data.
Not all hosting customers need a database, so we do not automatically setup a database with every hosting account.
Additional programming may be required to access and use the database, depending on how you plan to use it within your site, so you may need to hire a web developer to help with this.
If you have a cPanel account, you can set up databases under the "Databases" section.
For other hosting accounts, you will need to contact our Webmaster.

PHP & Perl Scripts

PHP and Perl are "server-side" scripting languages used by webmasters and programmers to build dynamic website content.
Dynamic content, as opposed to "static" content, responds to input.
So if you want a form that a visitor fills out to be emailed to you, use a script to process it.
If you want a shopping cart to "put something in a basket", you use a script to process the input.
The possibilities are limitless.
Our webservers support these two popular languages as well as several others.
Contact us with questions.

Ecommerce, Shopping Carts, Order Forms & Security

We are asked "what shopping cart do you recommend?" at least once a week.
The answer is that no single shopping cart works well for all sites.
It depends on many things, like:

What you are selling – Is it a product or a service?

How you ship it – UPS, FEDEX? U.S.-only or worldwide? Flat rate or by weight or qty?

How many products you sell – Just a couple books or a whole product line?

What about colors, sizes, options? How many choices does a customer need to make before they can check out?

How will you process payments? At your location "later", or "real-time" via an Internet Payment Gateway, or Paypal or..?

What about order tracking and customer contact?

Would a single page order form work, or do you need a shopping cart?

Do you need SSL security? (The answer is "yes") Are you taking credit cards directly?